As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney breezily enter their second decade together, they pay tribute to and put their own spin on the Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting.
In the case of the Black Keys, that spiritual home lies in the Mississippi Delta, the swamp that gave birth to American blues. Plenty of legendary musicians played Delta blues in the early 20th century, but Auerbach and Carney were drawn chiefly to Junior Kimbrough, a Mississippi bluesman whose career didn’t take off until the 1990s, when the future Black Keys members were teenagers.
Delta Kream isn’t the first time the Black Keys have paid explicit tribute to Junior Kimbrough. He’s been a constant presence in their work, a songwriter they’ve frequently covered, as they did at length on the 2006 EP Chulahoma. Kimbrough originally recorded about half of the songs the Black Keys cut for Delta Kream; his Delta colleague R.L. Burnside—another Mississippi bluesman who experienced a late-life renaissance in the 1990s—is responsible for two other songs on the record. The Black Keys didn’t limit their Kimbrough connection to the repertoire. His former bassist Eric Deaton rounds out the rhythm section, while Burnside’s guitarist sat in on the two-day, 10-hour session that happened at the conclusion of the Black Keys supporting tour for 2019’s “Let’s Rock”.
“Let’s Rock,” the Black Keys once again started playing arenas, a long way from the grimy Midwestern dives they gigged at two decades earlier. It’s possible to chart that evolution through one song—Junior Kimbrough’s “Do the Rump,” a song the duo cut on their 2002 debut The Big Come Up and recorded again on Delta Kream as “Do the Romp.” The change in vowel isn’t the only difference between the two recordings. In the beginning, the Black Keys played hard: Carney pummeled the backbeat and Auerbach affected a growl to compete with his overdriven amps. Here, the duo not only sounds relaxed, they play with finesse. Some of that aplomb could be chalked up to the confidence derived from their enduring stardom, while the fullness of Delta Kream could be attributed to how it captures an expanded quartet unwinding on their home turf of Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville.
Delta Kream sounds spacious but never trippy. The Black Keys explore textures and luxuriate within grooves, an aesthetic choice that pulls the album much closer to such kaleidoscopic latter-day albums as 2014’s Turn Blue than the raucous 2004 breakout hit Rubber Factory. Their version of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake” puts the emphasis on the crawl, not the snake, a move that robs the band of some bite. Perhaps Delta Kream doesn’t deliver the visceral thrill of juke-joint blues, but its expansive jams do touch upon the modal drone Kimbrough could achieve when he locked into a vamp. The Black Keys put their own spin on this Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting even when the tempo ratchets up to a boogie, which it doesn’t often do on Delta Kream.
Coming on the heels of the aggressively cheerful “Let’s Rock”, Delta Kream feels subdued. That’s part of its appeal. It’s a record knocked out in two days by a band who are well on their way to be the grizzled veterans they’ve long admired. Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.
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